College student live-tweets police standoff

College Station police on Tuesday night were alerted to a family disturbance involving reports of a firearm being fired inside a Harvest Street home.

The disturbance ended up turning into an hourslong police standoff involving SWAT and hostage negotiation teams. The incident was resolved when William Herring, 20, of College Station was arrested on charges of assault and evading arrest.

But what happened during the standoff is what is making headlines.

A neighbor, Texas A&M sophomore Hayden Greer, began live-tweeting the entire incident, down to posting details about the number of police involved, their movements, and other specific details. Greer even began using a hashtag, #LiveTweetTheNeighborTakedown, which soon caught on in the community.

Greer wasn't available for comment on Thursday afternoon.

"We became aware that someone was posting information about police actions, so we reached out to the guy to see if we could get him to stop posting information about what we were doing," said Lt. Chuck Fleeger with the College StationPolice Department. Greer was cooperative and ceased his social media play-by-play.

Fleeger says that with Greer's tweets "going out to anyone and everyone," he could have possibly put police and other residents in danger. He would have preferred the man to instead call 911 and alert police of anything he was seeing that was helpful to police rather than telling the Twitterverse.

"Social media can be very valuable to police, but citizens should use discretion during these cases," says Fleeger.

Fleeger is not especially worried about a suspect following along on Twitter, but he said it's important to remember that lives could always be at stake.

Fleeger says that he isn't against citizens sharing some details about what is going on in front of them, but to at least keep law enforcement in mind.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the manhunt that ensued, plenty of Bostonians were posting pictures of police and FBI seeking out the suspects. It was one of the first times that the general population, the social media hive-mind, was aiding in an active police investigation.